"I
would compare the situation with the subliminal advertising that was
outlawed in the 1970s," said Associate Professor Christoph Bartneck, of
Canterbury University's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, or HIT
Lab.

"We are in a danger of repeated the exact same issue with the use of our language."

Bartneck has been working in the
area with colleague Jurgen Brandstetter and other experts at the New
Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour and Northwestern
University in the US.

Their
project has investigated how language changes and involves over time,
and how robots and computers could influence not just the words we use,
but our attitude toward those words.

Remarkably, the researchers showed it took only around 10 per cent of
people to own a speech-enabled robot to completely dominate the usage of
words.

One study involved
pre-testing what word participants would normally use in a context, and
then attempting to change this behaviour by consistently encouraging
them to pick another word instead.

Following the experiment, the researchers checked whether the
participants had switched to using the alternative word, and also
whether their view toward that word had changed. "It did," Bartneck said.

"Given that this form of influence works in principle, it can be used
by the companies that currently provide technology to influence
consumers."...

"Trying to change the behaviour of people is in itself not necessarily unethical, but we need to be aware of it."

0
comments:

Contact me

About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.